Peter Foster is the Telegraph's US Editor based in Washington DC. He moved to America in January 2012 after three years based in Beijing, where he covered the rise of China. Before that, he was based in New Delhi as South Asia correspondent. He has reported for The Telegraph for more than a decade, covering two Olympic Games, 9/11 in New York, the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, the post-conflict phases in Afghanistan and Iraq and the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan.

Time for China to stop wheedling over North Korea

So it seems certain that when South Korea releases its official report on Thursday into the sinking of its warship, Cheonan, with the loss of 46 lives last March, that it will point the finger of blame squarely at Pyongyang.

After weeks of anonymous briefings from officials, Seoul’s foreign minister Yu Myung-hwan has come out and said it is “obvious” that the ship was sunk by a North Korean torpedo, paving the way for the matter to be reported to the UN.

The key question now, is how China will react and the implications that has for its relations with the United States which has been visible in its support for the South’s position that some action must be taken against Pyongyang.

First, we must wait and see just how clear the evidence really is. However according to reports from Seoul today the multi-national investigation has collected a piece of the alleged torpedo which has a number written on it in a North Korea font. This, say officials, is the “smoking gun”.

Forensic analysis of traces of the RDX explosive have also been matched with that used in a captured North Korean torpedo taken by the South seven years ago.

We shall have to see exactly how the evidence is presented. But if the investigators lay it out for all the world to see, with the requisite pictures and data, and the wider world judges it to be incontrovertible, then China is in a fix.

Already there are signs of wheedling from the Chinese who, you can bet your bottom South Korean won, will do everything they can to cast doubt on the South Korean findings.

Why? Because if it is proved that the North torpedoed that ship, it also simultaneously torpedoes the entire Chinese strategy of engaging the North through economic aid and the stalled six-part talks on nuclear disarmament.

Perhaps, as the North Korea specialist Aidan Foster-Carter writes here, this issue will finally put an end to the charade of denials over Korea (on all sides) in which the menace of Kim Jong-il is shoved into the naughty-boy corner of world affairs in the hope that he’ll either go away or see sense.

As Kim’s visit to China a week ago showed, that strategy doesn’t work. He simply refuses to enter into any explicit aid-for-nukes bargain with China because he has no more wish to be obligated to his chief economic sponsor than to anyone else.

Kim well knows that Chinese fears of his regime imploding and the chaos that would cause will always trump its irritation at his refusal to embrace economic reforms or, indeed, any of the norms of international behavior.

Nobody sane wants a war on the Korean Peninsular, but by the same token Kim simply cannot be allowed to get away scot-free with torpedoing another country’s warship. Options might be limited, but something has to be done.

This drama unfolds in Seoul tomorrow, but the real spotlight, the very uncomfortable spotlight, will quickly fall back on Beijing where, coincidentally, the US and China will engage in the latest round of its Strategic Dialogue on Monday and Tuesday.

This is a bell-weather moment. As an emerging world power with the commensurate responsibilities, will China wheedle, squirm and obfuscate, or will it join the rest of the world in taking some kind of stand against Pyongyang?